The Kirkus Prize is one of the richest literary awards in the world, with a prize of $50,000 bestowed annually to authors of fiction, nonfiction and young readers’ literature. It was created to celebrate the 81 years of discerning, thoughtful criticism Kirkus Reviews has contributed to both the publishing industry and readers at large. Books that earned the Kirkus Star with publication dates between November 1, 2014, and October 31, 2015, are automatically nominated for the 2015 Kirkus Prize, and the winners will be selected on October 23, 2015, by an esteemed panel composed of nationally respected writers and highly regarded booksellers, librarians and Kirkus critics.

Welcome back to Clarkland, where the menace to young womanhood is piled on as thick as whipped cream, and where, this time, a TV reporter's investigation of a nefarious fertility clinic—and of her own family—is provoked by the street murder of a woman who looks like her identical twin.
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"Fyfield's intelligence is as ferociously penetrating as ever- -unhappy Rose is particularly well-drawn—but there's barely enough action here to keep the pot simmering while waiting for Mr. Logo's plausible maleficence to bring it to a boil."

Crown Prosecutor Helen West (Deep Sleep, 1992, etc.) takes time out from her repeated attempts to convict a chronic stalker of schoolgirls called Mr. Logo to befriend Rose Darvey, an angry, compulsively promiscuous case clerk in her office, when she runs into her at a pregnancy clinic—not realizing that Rose has a surprisingly long-standing connection with Margaret Mellors, oh-so-proper Mr. Logo's next-door neighbor and surrogate mother, a connection that's about to bear fatal fruit.
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"An unbearably memorable ending lifts this to classic level while the thin bright nerves of the storyline are padded with magnificent surgical detail, hospital lore, and moods you can rub your finger down."

McGrath carries on his winning streak in the short horror novel form (Spider, 1990; The Grotesque, 1989; Blood and Water and Other Tales, 1987). Dr. Haggard's disease is sexual passion, and the story of its ravages is told in flashback as the crippled hero pieces it out to the heroine's son James, an RAF pilot.
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The author of A Dirty Distant War (1987), etc., teams up with a career soldier/spy on a thriller about a top-secret OSS effort to round up Hitler and his cronies before they can commit suicide or otherwise escape the crashing Third Reich.
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Amazing but true: the major upheavals in Soviet-American policy from the Cuban missile crisis to the abortive coup against Gorbachev were all sparked by a monstrous sibling rivalry between two half- brothers, raised half a world apart.
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The promise of Richard's story collection The Ice at the Bottom of the World (which won the 1990 PEN/Hemingway Award) is only fitfully apparent in his surrealistic first novel about a boy and his first sea voyage.
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"A somewhat dour story recommended for the staunch of heart and stomach."

In the year 1655, during the English civil war, a parish woman is hanged for witchcraft, also known as ``malefice''; and in a series of guilty, grim soliloquies, townspeople and a local gentry reveal their own rather brutal sins and crimes.
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"Occult twaddle with a surface scholarly sheen: it's all breathless and urgent—and will probably Materialize on the bestseller lists. (Literary Guild Dual Selection for May)"

Spellman's corpulent, noisy, sagas with their pretzel plots (Paint the Wind, 1990, etc.) have dealt with earthly mayhem; but now we get a mammoth occult bash, much of the action taking place several mystical leagues off the ground and back all the way to ancient Egypt—with demons booming, gorge-rising sanguinary rites, and a cosmic battle of Satan's fan club vs. a grandmother.
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"Vietnam to the Illinois town of Millhaven (Straub's counterpoint to friend Stephen King's Castle Rock) and that will probably have the author's fans lining up at the cash registers. (Book-of-the-Month Dual Selection for Spring)"

Submitted by the publisher to Kirkus too late to review, Straub's latest is a sequel to both his bestselling Koko (1988) and his less popular Mystery (1989), resurrecting characters from each (Tim Underhill of Koko and Tom Pasmore of Mystery among them) to investigate a series of killings known as the Blue Rose Murders.
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A. J. Fikry’s life is not at all what he expected it to be. He lives alone, his bookstore is experiencing the worst sales in its history, and now his prized possession, a rare collection of Poe poems, has been stolen. But when a mysterious package appears at the bookstore, its unexpected arrival gives Fikry the chance to make his life over—and see everything anew. “Zevin writes characters who grow and prosper,” our reviewer writes, “in a narrative that is sometimes sentimental, sometimes funny, sometimes true to life and always entertaining.”
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FEATURED FICTION AUTHOR

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a phosphorescent fungus threatens the health and happiness of identical twin sexagenarian sisters, their Filipino-American Shakespearean actress landlord and the enterprising Russian girl squatting in her Brooklyn townhouse closet.

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